EAA Aviation Museum

The Experimental Aircraft Association began in 1953, when a handful of aviation enthusiasts met near Milwaukee with a shared idea: that regular people, not just aircraft companies, should be able to design and build their own airplanes. What started as a local club grew into an international movement, and its annual gathering, now called AirVenture, moved to Oshkosh in 1970 and never left.

The museum opened to give a permanent home to the aircraft and stories the association had gathered over the decades. Rather than focus only on famous machines, it celebrates the whole span of recreational and experimental flight, the barnstormers, the backyard builders, the racers, and the restorers. It is a place shaped by amateurs in the truest sense, people who fly for the love of it.

The collection ranges from the earliest days of powered flight through the jet age. You will see delicate early homebuilts, aerobatic and racing planes that pushed the limits of speed, replicas of pioneering aircraft, and the sleek record-setters that carried pilots farther and faster than anyone thought possible. Interactive exhibits let younger visitors and grown-ups alike try the controls and understand how a wing actually lifts a plane into the air.

The Eagle Hangar is devoted to the aircraft and airmen of World War II, with restored warbirds and personal stories of the crews who flew them. Elsewhere, galleries trace the growth of the homebuilt movement itself, honoring the ordinary innovators whose garage projects reshaped what flight could be. It is a museum best taken slowly, cockpit by cockpit.

Behind the main museum lies Pioneer Airport, a re-creation of a small grass-strip field from the golden age of aviation, complete with period hangars and a working turf runway. In the warmer months, vintage aircraft are rolled out, and visitors can watch antique planes fire up and lift off, engines coughing and propellers spinning, a scene straight out of the 1920s and 1930s.

This living, moving side of the museum is what makes Oshkosh special. Aviation here is not only preserved behind glass but kept flying, greased, and running. Seeing and hearing an old biplane climb into a Wisconsin sky drives home why generations of people have given their lives over to the pursuit of flight.

For most of the year Oshkosh is a quiet manufacturing and college city on Lake Winnebago. But for one week each summer, the EAA's AirVenture fly-in transforms it into a spectacle unlike anything else in aviation. Tens of thousands of aircraft arrive, from homebuilt kit planes to historic bombers to cutting-edge jets, and Wittman Regional Airport briefly becomes the busiest airport on the planet.

The camaraderie of the event is its own draw: pilots camp under their own wings, swap stories late into the night, and share a passion that crosses generations and nations. Even outside of AirVenture week, the museum carries that same spirit of welcome, run by and for people who simply love the idea of leaving the ground.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.